Healthy Inspiration for This 'Lost Generation'

Our stories of yesterday can inspire this new lost generation to get healthy and stay healthy. I walked uphill both ways to and from school and I'm ready to tell my story of how my pals and I did things when we were young and class was dismissed for summer. We actually did… (wait for it)…exercise back then!

It seems it was just the other decade that I would wake up late with early plans to get the day off to a good start. I'd eat breakfast and then head off for several games with my bat and glove. If baseball was king then my friends and I were members of the royal family during those summers of fun.

Half a dozen phone calls got the plans moving for the first game at about 10AM. It began as a daily event with a group of us neighborhood teenage kids, but soon word spread and we were getting ball players from all over our northern Indiana city. No one had their license yet so arrival to our daily games was a la Schwinn and Huffy.

Ground zero for the activities was an open field next to a church. There were several ready-made and ordinary baseball diamonds at the nearby school, but we chose to create our unique field of dreams adjacent to this house of worship. It seemed to work with that Dr. Seuss quote of "Why fit it when you were born to stand out."

I don't think anyone can really remember exactly when or why we started playing at this precise spot. It just happened one day and I believe that's part of what made it so magical. The playing field involved the usual grass and dirt and bases. Our space also involved bushes, sidewalks, an evergreen tree, and a towering rooftop of biblical proportions. The good Dr. Seuss would have wanted it no other way.

A homerun in center field was any ball that landed on the high slanted roof of the church. It was nothing short of awesome to watch a well-hit arcing fly ball plunk off the roof for a game winning shot in the bottom of the ninth inning. You could sometimes hear the church's organ playing Queen's We Are the Champions after those dramatic walk-off homers.

Some members of the church congregation caught wind of our alleged acts of blasphemy from landing baseballs on the Lord's house. We would occasionally experience a ranking church official showing up and giving us the ecclesiastical ejection for our misguided choice of this place of recreation.

We would then scatter around the neighborhood until the coast was clear and we'd resume play after the brief abstain delay. It must have ultimately been God's will though to let us play ball there. We spent several summer seasons rounding the bases on that Promised Land.

We didn't use a traditional baseball which likely explains why we never broke any stained glass windows. We used tennis balls instead.

We also eighty-sixed the wooden baseball bats and chose plastic bats reinforced with duct tape. There was no commissioner of our league to tell us the weight and size of an admissible homemade bat. If you made it and brought it; then it worked.

We'd play three games on some of those dog days of summer. Then we'd ride our bikes to our buddy's house to go swimming and finally call it a day. Baseball, biking, and swimming ruled our days for those few years until girls and beer showed up and taught us strange new tongues.

Please let your sons and daughters or nephews and nieces know that there is a world of exercise out there just beyond the reach of the internet and social media.

If you find that you ever need an extra player, you can put me in coach. I'm ready to play…today. Look at me; I can be centerfield.

This article of balls and strikes is brought to you by that guy with no errors. That golden glove guy is Ron Blake and he can be found turning double plays these days at rblake5551@hotmail.com.

About the Author

Ron Blake Ron Blake is an artist and writer born in Gary, Indiana and raised with four siblings in the Chicago suburbs. Blake graduated with an MPA from Indiana University. He is a proud honorary Pennsylvanian contributing articles for Erie Gay News since the Obama Presidency. Also contributing articles and Op-Ed pieces for numerous LGBT publications as well as for USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and Austin American-Statesman. He now resides in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. Instagram, Ron Blake (@blakelateshow) | TikTok, Ron Blake | LinkedIn